I don't offend some of the people most of the time

Month: January 2012

I was in Home Depot the other day buying paint, and while the guy was mixing it I went to the restroom. I had my little dog with me because she’s like a loaf of marble rye or a fur handbag tucked under my arm almost everywhere I go.

About the time I went into the door, the phone rang and it was my husband returning my call. Since I couldn’t wait and I didn’t want to play phone tag with him, I took the call as I rushed into the stall. Usually I can hold the dog and go to the bathroom – don’t ask me how, just trust me. But since I had the cell phone in the other hand, I had to put the dog down.

My husband did what he does better than anything else in the world, he started a fight. “What do you mean you want granite for the countertop? What happened to laminate?”

“My cousin Nancy says we should get a piece of scrap granite and use that.”

“I’m about sick of your cousin Nancy. That will cost $100 a square foot.”

“Not if we have John install it.”

“This is getting me all distressed.”

“You’re never anything but distressed.”

Right then I heard a lady scream two stalls down, followed by, “You’re a little dog, holy shit you scared the crap out of me. I thought you were some kind of rodent.”

I burst out laughing because it had not occurred to me that the dog would wander several stalls down and that there would be someone else in the bathroom. The woman was no doubt listening intently to me arguing with my husband and was completely off guard. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a small black creature wanders under the stall and jumps up on her wanting to get pet, and her with her pants hanging down around her knees – I couldn’t help but laugh – I’m laughing right now all over again.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I heard my husband’s voice in the cell phone say, “Well that’s a first.”

“Not you,” I snapped.

“It’s sure a cute little dog,” the woman in the stall said. “But he gave me quite a fright.”

“It’s a girl,” I said.

“Who’s a girl?” my husband asked.

“I’ll call you back,” I said and hung up.

I finished my mission, called the dog and ran out of the bathroom before the other woman could see me, although I don’t know what good that would do if she came across me in the aisles with that dog tucked under my arm. Luckily my paint was done and I could bolt without running into her.

Embarrassing as they are, I love those crazy times when there’s a confluence of circumstances that gives me a few deep belly laughs. I should have sought that woman out and thanked her.

Men do not look good naked – at least not to women. We don’t mind a nice looking guy in a pair of shorts – except if they are short-shorts, which look almost as bad as a naked man. A guy in a speedo is the worst. This may be an acquired taste for some women, but the rest of us would rather look at a puddle of vomit full of maggots than a man in a speedo.

Unlike a woman, who will incite a veritable stampede of men if she simply takes off her shirt, a man must have other qualities besides a nice body in order to attract a women. He is forced to demonstrate his manly prowess by opening stubborn jar lids.

In the animal kingdom, males have to work very, very hard to attract a mate. They’ve got to butt antlers with other males with the force of a sledge hammer, or make their feathers stand up like they’ve stuck their beak into an electrical outlet.

The human male species, most of which lack either feathers or antlers, have to resort to other rituals to attract women. They will offer to carry things for you to show how strong they are. They will buy you dinner to show how much money they have. They’ll put on some manly smell-um.

You wanna know what’s really funny, though? I use Word for Mac to write, and Word is constantly underlining words because I am not the most accurate typist in the world. Hence as I write it looks like some nasty English teacher has just graded it.

At the moment, this blog is full of those red underlined words. I will run spell check and it will find correct most of them, but there will still be some intractable words remaining that I’ll have to Google to verify their spelling or change them to something else that I know I can spell.

Amongst the typos and the normal words that look like they’re spelled correctly but Word, the hussy, underlines them anyway, Word has let me get away with the word smell-um. It just did it again. Is smell-um seriously a real word?

I’m going to have to take this matter to Google and see if smell-um is, in fact, a bona fide word in the English language because frankly I don’t mind telling you that I would be shocked – SHOCKED – if it in fact is a real word. Be right back.

OMG, the Urban Dictionary says it IS a real word, although they don’t hyphenate it. Here’s what they said:

smellum

Smell-um (smael-um) -a fragrance, often used in personal care products that are applied to one’s person.1. Ulysses Everett McGill from O Brother, Where Art Though: “I like the smell of my hair treatment; … as soon as we get ourselves cleaned up and we get a little smellum – Dapper Dan Hair Tonic – in our hair…”

2. Calvin Klein’s Obsession is a nice little smellum.

So I tried to imitate the spelling by taking out the hyphen, but Word isn’t having any part of that. It likes smell-um but not smellum. Go figure.

Speaking of figures, I like a man in some low-slung jeans and barefoot without a shirt if he doesn’t sling them too low like those ridiculous Abercrombie and Fitch guys. I do NOT want to see the top of a man’s hairless pubic area. Someone must have waxed the hair away – those pants are so low – which seems sissy. I look away when I walk past their store in the mall. It’s the antithesis of attracting a mate, in my mind. Worse than a naked man, and it’s hard to get much worse than that.

I’m a little shy about marketing myself. Members of my writing group and a couple of my friends know I write this blog, but I’m not emailing people and pestering them to read my new posts.

But I did send “The Dieter’s Song” to my writer’s group and some of my friends who I thought would commiserate with it. The response has been great! Debz says, “As I sit here my stomach still churning from the Tempeh and veggies I had for dinner, I think this little ditty was the best antacid anyone could offer! Suzanne…you are a genius!”

I am going to take that as a compliment.

Sunny said, “Sweetheart you are hysterically funny!!! Loved it and shared it!”

And this from Gloria, “Oh Suzanne, this is so funny!

I mean: da da da da da da da friggin’ funny!”

Kelli says, “Love! Love it so much Suz. Very cute and cleaver:)” I especially like that Kelli thinks I’m cleaver – which is a new word defined as a clever person with cleavage.

And finally from Donna, “Unbelievable…and to think you’re hiding behind a solar panel…somehow you MUST write more!!! :} thanks for the laugh today. I’ve been working my butt off with a slew of exercise tapes and have lost nothing. Now I can at least laugh when I get on the scale tomorrow. :}”

There are a couple of things about Donna’s comment I want to address. (1) by “hiding behind a solar panel” she means that I have not been writing as much because I’m working such long hours managing a solar company.

(2) I am not at all sure what those brackets Donna is using mean. They don’t look like smiley faces. They’re actually a little unnerving – like something that could sneak up on you in the night. Something sinister with evil intent. Some kind of heathen thing. (Heathen is a great word – I saw it on a rerun of the Big Bang Theory tonight and decided, “I’m going to get that word in my blog post tonight somehow or the other.” And sure enough, I managed to do just that. It is so satisfying to achieve a goal.)

Because of the great response, I am elated and feel quite bold and I’ve decided, just for today, to be shamelessly self-promoting. This urge may not hit very often, so take advantage of it now! Feel free to refer me to your friends and have them send flattering comments as well. This is a limited time offer – don’t let this opportunity slip away. Get your comment in TODAY!

We have reason to celebrate, albeit a small reason. I had set a goal to write a blog post every day, and I was doing great until about post number 320. Then I started working full time (meaning way over 40 hours a week) at a solar company, and I was too tired to write.

I was exhausted each day and would come home and work at night on my computer trying to set systems in place that would “save time” and make the company “more efficient.” So exhaustion was part of the reason the blogs stopped. The excuse is that developing new systems is not fun – you encounter computer glitches all day, the project starts running way over budget, things don’t work like they’re supposed to – even after 4,000 tweaks. In other words, the humor gets vacuumed out of your life like an elephant sucking up a peanut.

Which leads me to the question – why do elephants like peanuts? Maybe it’s the salt. Or maybe they like the crunchy shell, because that peanut completely disappears – they don’t spit out the shell, not any elephant I’ve ever seen. I’m going to ask Google.

I’m back, and glad I took the time to answer this very burning question, which leads to another question: why do we call them “burning” questions? Could it be the same reason that whenever my son gets money, it “burns” a hole in his pocket?

I could ask Google that as well, but I’ll save it for another day because I know you’re “burning” to know the answer to the question, “Why do elephants like peanuts?” The answer, according to “Denny” at Yahoo! Answers, is: “Because African elephants risk their lives in dark caves for halite (NaCl) for their daily diet. Now circus elephants love peanuts because they’re rich in halite mineral, and they’re abundant.”

English teachers would say, “What’s abundant, the elephants or the peanuts?” even though they know exactly which one you’re talking about. They would have passed out a worksheet with this whole answer on it for us to “circle the mistakes” because it is fraught with errors and, might I add, needlessly aggravating. For instance, you are probably scratching your head and saying, “What in the rabbit-assed hell is halite?”

No wait, that’s what my dad would have said. He had all these unusual sayings that he or somebody made up but fit the circumstances so you never questioned what he was talking about.

As to the answer, why couldn’t Denny just tell us, because you and I don’t know what halite is, and we don’t have time to Google it since we’ve gone astray too many times in this blog already. But no, that’s all he said. I knew from high school chemistry that NaCl is sodium chloride, better known to you lay persons as “table salt.” So the answer, apparently, is because elephants need salt and a peanut has it. The imbecile (that’s a great word by the way, and one I don’t get to use nearly as often as I’d like) went on to say that peanuts originated in Africa, which is at least interesting.

Curiosity got the best of me so I just asked Google, who sent me to Wikipedia, which says: ”Halite, commonly known as rock salt, is the mineral form of sodium chloride (NaCl).”

Now that that is all cleared up, I think we should get back to today’s topic (finally), i.e. why do we have reason to celebrate? Because I had time and humor enough over the last year to write a few blogs, and I have reached 365! Which is the goal I set, even though it took me longer to do it than anticipated. Break out the champagne! Hmmm, I wonder why we “break out” the champagne. Is it because we…aw heck, let’s just clink those glasses together and drink up!

If you are like me, totally lacking in will power, then you’ve probably already fallen off the New Year’s Resolution Diet wagon.

I made up a song to help us both climb back on and ride that thing into the sunset – or at least until the end of January, which I think is a pretty good success rate for an impossible New Year’s Resolution.

This song is sung to the tune of the “59th Street Bridge Song” better known as “Feeling Groovy” by Simon and Garfunkle. If you’re not familiar with the song, here’s a link to listen (the commercial at the first is short): www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBQxG0Z72qM&feature=related

59th Attempted Diet Song

Slow down, you’re eatin’ too fast
You gotta make that salad last
Just pickin’ at the chicken bones
Lustin’ for more cause
I’m so hungry
Ba da da da da,da da friggin’ hungry.

Hello French toast
Whip cream flowin’
Can’t eat you – my belly’s growin’
Not one single bite for me
Do it do do do I’m so hungry
Ba da da da da,da da friggin’ hungry.

Got no cheese or booze,
No licorice or wheat
I’m starving and grumpy and feeling so weak
Let the morning scales drop all these pounds off of me…
Diet, I hate you,
I’m so hungry
Ba da da da da,da da friggin’ hungry.

Sing this tune when you’re tempted to gorge yourself. I hope it works better for you than it has for me…

Last night I won playing Bingo. I won $25 the first game, and when I went up to get my winnings, they also let you pick an additional goofy little prize, and they had a couple of glow sticks, a back scratcher, Pop Rocks, a candy necklace– some really cool stuff. And they had a Bible. A BIBLE. In the bar as a prize for gambling. It was a white Bible in a plastic wrapper about the size of a regular 6” x 9” paperback book.

I did not need another Bible, but the Catholic guilt in me launched a monologue in my head that I could hear even above the pounding music. The guilt said, “You can’t choose exploding candy over a Bible, how could you even think that? Pick it up right now and get it out of this dive.”

I heaved my shoulders back and said to myself, “Look, I don’t need another Bible and I really, really want those Pop Rocks.”

“If you don’t choose it, every one who wins Bingo tonight is going to come over here and make fun of the Bible. You HAVE to take it.”

This argument went on for an inordinate amount of time, but as you may well have guessed, guilt won out and I sheepishly grabbed the Bible and sulked back to the table.

“Oh my gosh,” Laurie said. “She picked the Bible!” Laurie and Olivia burst out laughing as if that was the funniest thing they’d ever witnessed. Olivia grabbed it and looked at the label on the back. “This thing was published in China, the most atheistic country in the world. So you won a Bible published in a godless country in a bar while you’re drinking beer and gambling.”

She tore open the plastic wrap. “Is it written in Chinese?” I asked.

“No it’s in English, but the words are microscopic,” Olivia said. “Nobody could read this.”

She handed me the Bible, and I thumbed through it. The words were as small as the directions on a medicine bottle, and therefore cannot be seen by the naked human eye.

They kept laughing and making Bible-in-the-bar jokes until the guy came around with more Bingo cards. We bought cards and spread them out, dobbing the free space and getting prepared for the next game. Laurie put her hand on the Bible and said, “For good luck.” Olivia and I put our hands on top of her’s, and then started giggling because of the irony of that – asking the Lord to look favorably upon our gambling.

Turns out Olivia played on one of my Bingo cards and won, so I acquired 50 more dollars. Since it was my card officially, I was the winner. I thought the Christian thing to do was split the money with them because by that time I’d had enough alcohol to make me magnanimous. We coaxed Olivia to go up and get the winnings, and as the extra prize she picked out the Pop Rocks. We also split the three little bags in the package so I ended up with my exploding candy after all. It was Karma – or whatever the equal to that is in the Bible. I believe I made the right choice.

I was in a building permit office today waiting for a solar electric system plan review – which is strikingly similar to waiting for a jury to pronounce a sentence on you because you’re at the plan reviewer’s mercy, holding your breath that (s)he will accept the plans you’ve drawn and not ream you out with the words: “Looks like this is going to require engineering.” Because if (s)he says that, you’re immediately behind schedule by two+ weeks and your budget for the project will fly out the window like rays from the sun.

Since there is always a wait at these permit offices, they try to help you pass the hours with months’ old magazines. I picked up Shape magazine and within seconds found out I was at risk for glaucoma, skin cancer, and stroke – a victim of genetics.

Did you know that if you’re a woman who wears glasses, your risk of glaucoma rises – especially if it runs in your family (my risk came thanks to my grandfather who I affectionately called Pops).

Also if I wear sunscreen I’m more at risk for sunburn. Huh? According to the article, it’s because I may mistakenly think that I can stay out longer, or I’m not slathering on enough, or often enough, or maybe it’s because I got up on the wrong side of the bed. Scientists aren’t sure why.

I could have a stroke for any number of reasons, many of which I can’t do a thing about, such as having a parent whose had a stroke. Eating everything in sight also doesn’t help, apparently.

But now I must digress from this intriguing health lament to let you all know, each and every one of you, that I just won $75 playing Bingo! I went out with a couple of girlfriends to Renner’s bar in Multnomah where they play Bingo on Wednesday nights. I went kicking and screaming – the place has been a little uncouth in the past with drunken bar maids slurring out the numbers and trying (unsuccessfully) to be stand-up comedians between calling numbers, but they have new management and it’s not as rowdy as before. Yes, there were a couple of comments about the Bingo “balls,” but it’s hard to blame the guy calling the numbers for that. It was quite fun, all the more so because of winning and the beer and the cinnamon whiskey and the Jello shots with whipped cream and loud music.

Whoo-wee! I must elaborate more tomorrow – right now the bed is calling so loud my ears are ringing.

It’s January 3rd and my neighbor still has a gajillion (I counted) Christmas lights up in her front yard. It’s lit up like a stadium over there.

I like them, but I was taught that it’s white trashy to keep your Christmas lights on after New Year’s Day. You can leave them up all year round if you want (but that’s technically white trashy too), but if you turn them on Before Thanksgiving or After New Years, then, as Jeff Foxworthy says, “You might be a redneck.”

On the way home from the movie tonight (I saw, “We Bought a Zoo!” which was wonderful if you happen to like heart warming, feel good types ofd movies – I know this is not everyone’s cup of tea. Don’t get me started about blood and guts in movies. Why? Because I’m already off track with tonight’s subject and surely you don’t want me going even further afield? I didn’t think so).

On the way home from the aforementioned movie, I observed that about every fifth house still had their Christmas lights on. That equates to roughly 20% of the population in Portland, OR being trashy. I’m not sure how to compare this to the rest of the country, what I know about that is skewed because I don’t watch much TV, and the shows my husband has on are things like “Swamp People” and “Pawn Stars.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with people making an honest living navigating swamps with the necessity of subtitles on the screen because you can’t understand their tooth-impaired conversations, or trying to hock their treasures while the TV bleeps more than the Roadrunner because the patrons and pawn shop owners conduct their business via obscenities, but can you imagine the Rockerfellers or Kennedy’s engaged in these activities? I can just see one of these high-brows showing up amongst the assorted scraggly-haired, cuss word slingin’, rifle-totin’ “stars” of one of those shows.

“Oh, sorry there Mr. Rocketfeller, sir, but you jist stepped in a pile a gator shit right there.”

“Oh drat the luck, I will have to have my valet, James, sanitize my Oxfords when we get back to our hotel suite.”

Judging from what’s on my TV, about 98% of the US population is white trash, and the other 2% is merely foul-mouthed, with beeps making up a good 70% of the dialogue. I bet they all still have their Christmas lights up.

Well, that is enough facts and figures for one evening. I have beat this dead horse senseless, and so I will ride him off into the sunset, where my path will be illuminated with the warmth of Christmas lights looking like Santa’s runway all up and down the January streets.